Visions for the Future of Educational Technology

Educational Technology is in a period of exciting change, with new technologies such as augmented and virtual reality, new techniques to analyse student data, and new pedagogies for learning online at large scale. Universities are entering partnerships with publishers and startup companies to develop teaching and learning online. As the Computer Assisted Learning Research Group (CALRG) celebrates its 40^th anniversary, The Open University (OU) faces challenges and opportunities. The challenges are to find answers to three big questions. How can providers of online courses develop sustainable business models? How can institutions work together to develop courses that attract substantial numbers of fee-paying students and offer transferrable credit? How can course designers offer education that is both engaging and effective? The opportunities include developing new partnerships though the FutureLearn company to offer professional development courses with transferable credit, exploring inquiry learning at scale with the nQuire platform in collaboration with the BBC, and developing mobile technologies that promote broad and deep access to learning. A promising future research agenda is to examine how new educational technology can combine personalized with social learning. A lesson from 40 years of CALRG is that that successful computer-assisted learning involves not a series of exciting prototypes and quick fixes, but a sustained programme of research into the science of learning and the design of effective interventions.